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59 3 Hegel: The Truth of the Whole The divorce between thought and thing is mainly the work of the Critical Philosophy, and runs counter to the conviction of all previous ages, that their agreement was a matter of course. The antithesis between them is the hinge on which modern philosophy turns. (Hegel, HL 35, §22R) This absolute unrest of pure self-movement, in which whatever is determined in one way or another, e.g., as being, is rather the opposite of this determinateness, this no doubt has been from the start the soul of all that has gone before. (Hegel, PS 101, §163) What seems to happen outside of it, to be activity directed against it, is really its own doing, and Substance shows itself to be essentially Subject. When it has shown this completely, Spirit has made its existence identical with its essence; it has itself for its object just as it is. (Hegel, PS 21, §37) The method of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit—his first masterpiece and the work of his I will be using more than any other—is to examine an idea on its own terms, letting that idea present its best arguments and develop itself until it unwittingly exposes its own limitations and self-contradictions, thus overcoming itself. Rather than refuting a theory from the outside, employing external criteria it never intended to meet and would not accept , Hegel’s technique is to show how theories fail to meet their own standards, thus begging no questions. “If the refutation is thorough, it is derived and developed from the principle itself, not accomplished by counter-assertions and random thoughts from outside. The refutation would, therefore, properly consist in the further development of the principle , and in thus remedying the defectiveness” (Hegel, PS 13, §24; see also Gadamer 1976a, 5). As with the thought of many of the idealists, much of Hegel’s thought can be viewed as just this kind of internal refutation through extension of Kant. As Tom Rockmore puts it, “Although he rejects the letter of Kant’s critical philosophy, Hegel participates in the postKantian effort . . . to elaborate its spirit by thinking with Kant against Kant” (Denker and Vater 2003, 339). Hegel starts from Kant’s position, but finds it internally inconsistent as well as unsatisfying for other reasons. He ends up extending it far beyond the limitations Kant imposed, but to where he thinks Kant should have gone had he consistently followed out his own best insights. Hegel’s idealism is less a rejection of Kant’s thought than its completion or fulfillment by working out flaws that even Kant should recognize; in other words, Hegel’s thought is one enormous Aufhebung. According to Merold Westphal, “Hegel’s philosophy [takes] the form of a continuous debate with the critical philosophy; and we should not be too surprised when he defines philosophy as the refutation of Kant.”1 Hegel’s task is to be the Kant that Kant should have been were he sufficiently free of presuppositions to follow his own insights to their proper conclusions. Interestingly, Kant himself once described his own project as just this kind of overcomingthrough -extension of his great predecessor, Hume: “If we start from a wellfounded , but undeveloped, thought which another has bequeathed to us, we may well hope by continued reflection to advance farther than the acute man to whom we owe the first spark of light” (Kant, PFM 8/260). As we will see, Hegel considers “the divorce between thought and thing” that Kant instigates by distinguishing between our phenomenal knowledge and noumenal reality to be “the hinge on which modern philosophy turns” (Hegel, HL 35, §22R). The gap between these two renders our knowledge false since it is not of true reality; it is only Kant’s commitment to R1 noumena as reality existing independently from our thoughts about them that keeps the gap open. Thus, Hegel’s philosophical mission is to overcome this chasm between thinking and being without resorting to the mere dogmatic assertion of unity that Kant sought to overcome in the first place. Another flaw in Kant’s system is that even by his own lights Kant owes us an account of the specific table of categories he supplies. To say that our possession of precisely these categories instead of any others is a brute, inexplicable fact (see Kant, C1 B145–46; Kant, PFM 65/318; Kant, C2 48/46–47) is dogmatic and...

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